Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  Skinner called up to the driver. “I don’t know what the number is-”

  “It’s all right, miss, I know it.”

  It’s just temporary, Skinner insisted to herself. Just a place to keep our luggage while I sort this all out. I am certainly not relying on him. He is, after all, thoroughly unreliable.

  Henry, long-standing and equally long-suffering butler to the Comstock Vie-Gorgons, was quite prepared to turn Skinner and Karine away at the door, regardless of how wildly Karine waved her newly-acquired revolver about. The two were saved from the local gendarmerie only by the precipitous arrival of Valentine himself, who barreled past his butler and skidded to a halt where Skinner leaned against the cab.

  “Well! All right, this is a little peculiar,” Valentine announced. “Have you brought all your clothes with you?”

  “Ahem. Yes,” Skinner admitted. “It seems that I’ve…had a bit of a falling out with your cousin. Karine and I…Karine mostly…are in need of a place to store our belongings. Only for a few days, until we make some kind of alternative arrangements. This is…a bit of an awkward situation.”

  “Awkward, of course, yes. Listen, why don’t you have your men here bring everything into…Henry!” Valentine shouted over his shoulder. “Henry, have we got, can you make up the guest bedroom? We can put everything in there. We’ll make up the guest rooms, you’ll stay here, obviously. I say, you two,” he called to Emilia’s goons, “just start bringing that in, third floor, back of the hall.” The men glowered, but did not object. “You and Karine will stay here, of course.”

  “Just the luggage. We couldn’t impose,” Skinner insisted.

  “Well, you’ve got to stay somewhere, and it isn’t as though we haven’t got the room.” Indeed, the Vie-Gorgon townhouse on Comstock Street was notoriously spacious.

  Henry interrupted this exchange. “Sir, I’m afraid we’ve only the one spare bedroom available, right now-”

  “Oh, yes,” Valentine said, dismayed. He had quite forgotten the eight cousins visiting from the Low Provinces in the south.

  “It’s all right, Valentine, we don’t need-”

  “Of course, well,” Valentine snapped his fingers, immediately taken by the ingenuity of his new plan, “we’ll just make up my room-”

  “Valentine-”

  “Your room, sir!” Henry spluttered with outrage. “Can you imagine the scandal? It will be in the broadsheets in a day…”

  “Well, obviously I won’t be in it, Henry, you might as well show me more consideration than that.”

  “Valentine-” Skinner attempted to interject again, but the young man was on a tear, and would not be deterred.

  “I’ll stay in the guest room at the coroner’s office…I’m hardly at the house anyway. Karine can have the small guest bedroom, Skinner will stay in my room. Now…oh, here,” he drew a five-crown note from his wallet and offered it up to Emilia’s two thugs as a gratuity. The men stared at it, flabbergasted, before Valentine ushered them back into the cab and sent them off. “Now, as I was saying. I’ve some few things to take care of this evening, but I’ll make sure I drop by to ensure that Henry is taking good care of you both, right? We’ll want to talk about my cousin, of course, and don’t think I’ve forgotten about our exploit from the night before. Now. Away!”

  And with that, Valentine Vie-Gorgon was gone into the cooling evening. Karine, Skinner, and Henry the butler stood there, at the portico of the house on Comstock Street, and each one found him or herself entirely, unequivocally, and unmistakably at a loss for words. This lasted for several seconds and Valentine, had he stayed behind to time it, would have declared it a new record for puzzled silence precipitated by his eccentricity.

  It was Henry who spoke first, conditioned as he was to life with Valentine. “I suppose. I suppose I shall get those rooms ready.”

  Twenty-Two

  Constable Harald Increase Frye was bored and pleased to be so. Armistice would be over in two days, and until then Constable Frye was happy to fill out “Not a Significant Incident” reports and send them along to the Coroners at Raithower House. That afternoon, two young men-former servicemen, probably, as at least one limped on an artificial leg-having been taken by the spirit of the season had stumbled into the offices, drunk as skunks in an abbey, and requested that they could sleep the night in the cells. Constable Harald was pleased to oblige them, and doubly pleased to fill out a “Not a Significant Incident” report on the event. When the unmistakable murmur of a gathering crowd outside the office reached his ears, and Constable Harald went outside to discover an impromptu game of dice had broken out in the cobbled streets, Constable Harald was pleased to place a fiver above the line, pleased to accept his loss with dignity, and pleased again to fill out a “Not a Significant Incident” report.

  In all, Constable Harald had probably filled out close to a thousand various reports for the Coroners, a task he considered to be usually tedious and wasteful-especially the “Not a Significant Incident” reports. Why, after all, should he be filling out a report on an incident that was, by definition, not significant? What could the Coroners possibly want with such information? Usually, he shirked this responsibility a little, and filled out less than a third of those reports. But after an unpleasantly tumultuous Armistice-with suffragists, if not behaving violently, causing rather more trouble than they ought to be, and the Heretic that attacked the theater-Constable Frye was very, very happy to be able to report that no significant incidents were occurring in his district.

  Constable Coates arrived, as the first wave of Trowth’s panoply of church bells began thundering the nine o’clock hour. He’d brought a small cask of barley wine with him, and offered to share it with Constable Frye before they changed shifts. Constable Frye was pleased to oblige him though, notably, he did not fill out an incident report on the subject. Constables Coates and Frye had a wide-ranging discussion then-fueled by the potency of the barley-wine-that touched on many relevant Subjects of the Day. Among those topics were Women’s Suffrage, which was readily agreed on as a dangerous threat to the stability of the nation, and a product of an increasingly liberal education system; the Ettercap War, which Constable Coates believed a trial while it was occurring, but all for the best, in retrospect-Constable Frye, whose brother had lost a hand and part of his left ear during the Gorcia campaign-politely dissented on that score; and finally, the brief but extraordinary success of the play Theocles.

  Neither of the two men had seen the play in question, but Constable Frye was fully-prepared with an opinion on the subject, nonetheless.

  “’S not that I don’t think we should be makin’ plays about…about anything we like. I think we should be. I think tha’s what plays is for, right? Saying thin’s aloud as maybe you and I are too polite to. And believe me, i’s not like I’m always sure the Emperor-Word bless him and keep him-has always done quite right.” Constable Frye gulped down the last of his barley-wine, and was dismayed to discover that the cask that Constable Coates had brought was nearly empty. “’S just…this is a…’s a challengin’ time is all, and so the…he needs our support.”

  “That’s it,” Constable Coates concurred. “S’a challengin’ time. No time f’r dissent.”

  “Challengin’, right,” Constable Frye concurred.

  “Wit’ suffragists. ‘N them gangsters everywhere,”

  Constable Coates concurred yet again, in an effort to saturate the atmosphere with a sense of mutually-agreed on sensibility. “Still, I heard. I heard them sharpsies is still around, too.”

  “No,” Constable Frye responded, spoiling Coates’ ambition for universal consensus. “Can’t be. Where?”

  “The Arcadum,” Coates insisted. “They’re. Hidin’. Regrouping, I think. Plannin’…you know how they are. Crafty…crafty buggers.”

  “There’s no…here, hold on.”

  A man, shabbily dressed and with a glazed look in his eye, stumbled through the door of the gendarmerie station.

  “H
ere, sonny,” Constable Frye said, “what’s wrong? You look like death on a plate.”

  The man opened his mouth to speak, but produced only a metallic clack-clack-clack sound as his teeth snapped together and open again. He turned his head left and right, up and down at random, as though unable to comprehend his surroundings.

  “He’s drunk,” Constable Coates exclaimed-and he was certainly in a position to know.

  Constable Frye immediately got up from his chair and attended the man, having some half-conceived notion of escorting him down to the drunk tank, where the stranger could spend the night with his fellow inebriates. He’d managed to get his shoulder under the man’s arm and was guiding him towards the back room, when Constable Coates called out.

  “Here. What’s wrong with his tongue?”

  The man’s tongue, indeed, the whole inside of his mouth, was black with slimy ichor, as though he’d been drinking it-impossible, of course, as without special treatment, ichor was a fiendish poison to living tissue. “What…what have you been doing, son?” Constable Frye asked, as disused cognitive machinery sought to fight its way through the barley-wine fog. “What’s wrong, then?”

  The man opened his mouth again, producing another round of metallic clacking, then the scratchy sound of a bad phonograph. A cultured voice, clearly at odds with the man’s ragged appearance, emerged from his mouth, unaffected by the working of his lips.

  “Gentlemen,” said the voice, “I hope you understand that this is nothing personal. If you survive, please give Inspector Beckett my regards.”

  The stranger then, awkwardly, as though he barely retained control of his limbs, tore his shirt open. Set into his stomach-edges raggedly stitched into the flesh-was some manner of brass engine, with a large flywheel and a canister of glowing blue phlogiston. Next to it sat a lump of greasy brown material. The wheel began to spin, throwing off tiny blue sparks.

  “No, oh,” moaned Constable Frye as he turned to his companion. “Down! Get dow-”

  Constable Coates experienced a strange elation then, as the walls shimmered red and brown and turned to high, arching brass vaults. There was a pressure on his ears, a feeling that something had scooped him out from the inside, and now that empty cavity was trying to suck him inwards, causing him to implode. At the same time, he felt divorced from his body as it twisted away, crumpling to the floor, he felt lifted up, floating, as voices from his childhood reached out to him, his mother’s hands on the side of his face, his father’s voice whispering to him, gently telling him he was worthless, useless, stupid, a liar, lovingly telling him he was dying now, and should take a special joy in suffering the eternal discomfiture of the Divine Disharmony, soft claws gripped his soul, and then he was sliding back, back down to his ruined body, away from the whispering voices that warned him he would be back, he could never escape them, never avoid them, they would wait and wait until the sun burned out for him to return to them…

  Constable Godwin Coates blinked up at the ceiling which was charred black and dripping grey ash into his eyes. He tried to turn his face away, but could not. He tried to lift his hand and found his left arm unresponsive. His right arm moved, and he flopped it over his chest. He did not feel any pain, felt instead insulated from pain, as though his mind was packed around with wool, a delicate glass bauble suspended in the center of a splintered crate. He tried to swallow and choked on dust and ash instead.

  Voices continued to murmur at him, though he was sure these were not real voices, that his hearing had been destroyed by the weapon. He felt sure he could feel, through the cloud of shock, blood trickling from his ears. The voices murmured anyway, and though Constable Godwin Coates was sure that what they were saying was pertinent, desperately important to his situation, he could not apprehend a single word, as though they were speaking just below the threshold of intelligibility. He strained to listen, but the more he concentrated on the voices, the more they seemed to recede, and the more a frenzied panic and an intolerable, fiery pain encroached on the edges of his senses.

  He surrendered, and began a series of dry, hacking coughs, spasms in the lungs and throat that grew more desperate and painful as the ash gripped him and no saliva was forthcoming. He wanted to roll over, at least, to turn away from the gray and black-etched ceiling, but he could not. Constable Godwin Coates had no idea how long he stayed there, prone and helpless on the floor, before he saw the man.

  A man in a dark charcoal suit with a long, charcoal coat. He had a red scarf wrapped around his face, and his left eye and the flesh around it seemed to be missing, revealing a black pit into the depths of his skull. His short hair was gray and thinning, and he carried a charcoal-covered tricorn hat in his hand. The man knelt down in front of Constable Coates, perhaps was trying to speak to him, though between the man’s red scarf and an incessant, sourceless ringing sound, Coates could not have said for sure.

  Wits scattered by the explosion, it took Godwin Coates several seconds to recognize the man in the red scarf as Elijah Beckett; when he did, Constable Coates did his best to speak. He was not certain if he succeeded, because he couldn’t hear himself, but he knew, somehow, that it was desperately important, that he had a vital message to deliver.

  “Beckett,” he croaked, or thought he croaked, or hoped he did, at least. “Beckett. It was.” He coughed again-he was dead certain of that, because it felt like someone had reached down his throat and torn out a handful of lung. He took one last, deep, gasping breath, and prayed that his voice was clear.

  “Anonymous John.”

  The breath left him, and the dark claimed him, and his fear rose to a roiling pitch as it did so. Constable Godwin Coates knew that the voices were waiting for him in the dark.

  Twenty-Three

  Have been studying the minds of my fellow men at length. Am largely disappointed. All men seem to want only to indulge in their creature comforts. Long time and effort spent carving predictable circles in which to spend their lives, just automatons made of meat and bone. What is the point of making another entity such as this?

  — from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

  Wolfram Hall was the official headquarters of the Royal Academy of Sciences-a lush, well-appointed townhouse on the Mile, right where the Daior-Crabtrees front met the entrenched defenses of the Gorgon-Vie architecture. The consequence of this was a very square building with very wide rooms and very low ceilings, and also an astonishing number of floral downspouts, as though the Daior-Crabtrees, frustrated by their inability to burn the building down and start over, were determined to occlude it with baroque gutter-work.

  This was where newcomers petitioned for membership in the Academy, where patents were filed, where a substantial library of monographs and recent scientific periodicals could be consulted. It was staffed primarily by clerks, students at the university, and third and fourth cousins of the major Esteemed Families who needed jobs that were well-paid but not particularly taxing.

  No serious scientist spent any time at Wolfram Hall, of course. The real work done by the Academy was in the Croft. At the leading edge of Old Bank, miraculously spared by the second activation of the Excelsior, was a vast complex of underground vaults, beneath what had once been the Abbey of St. Chretien. This Abbey was several decades older than the much more prominent Vie Abbey, and had been the center of religious life in Trowth for centuries before the church in Canth was disavowed and then replaced by the Church Royal. For years after that, the building served as the largest bank in Old Bank, and was indeed the bank from which that district originally took its name. After the Great Forfeiture, when all of the bank vaults were emptied in order to refill the royal treasury, Chretien’s Abbey stood disused and neglected.

  All until Harcourt Wolfram, in dire need of space to accommodate his titanic intellect and increasingly-ambitious experiments, petitioned the crown for a laboratory. The Croft, which subsequently saw the birth of the first difference engines, the first aetheric translators, as well as Mr. Stitch himsel
f, was commandeered by the Royal Academy of Sciences after Wolfram’s death, in a vain hope that the residue of his experiments could lead to even more breakthroughs that the great scientist had not considered.

  The vaults in the Croft extended for more than a square mile, deep beneath the city, ancient catacombs whose purpose, undoubtedly clear to the early grammateurs who’d built it, was now thoroughly obscure. They had now become a hotly-contested commodity for the scientific community of Trowth, and were the home of the more audacious, unlikely, and undoubtedly extremely dangerous researches of the Empire.

  This was where Beckett found himself on the morning after the death of Constables Coates and Frye: descending a narrow stairway deep into the belly of the Croft, to consult with an expert in necrology that he kept on retainer. Beckett had brought Gorud with him, and the therian took his surroundings in with an unflappable aplomb. Two porters carried a steamer trunk, in which were contained the remains of the black-tongued stranger responsible for the attack.

  After what Beckett considered to be an utterly unreasonable number of steps, they came to the small offices of the scientists in the Croft-tiny rooms stocked with notes and notebooks, where men like Ernst Helmetag-professor of Life Sciences and Asphyxiology-could consider the results of their work.

  “Ah, yes,” Ernst cried out, “Inspector Beckett, come in, come in. You men, put that there, that’s fine.” Ernst had the broad, ruddy features of the northern Trowthi, and a slight burr in his accent that was unmistakable. He wore a walrus mustache and was entirely bald. Between these features and the leather apron he wore, Ernst more closely resembled a jolly brewer than an expert in the animation of dead tissue. “Yes, now what have we here?” He paused above the trunk, then looked over at Gorud. “Ah. Is it appropriate? For that…I mean, the little fellow is surely out of his element here, perhaps he would care to wait…”